Blogging Ottinger (tim)

A recent article about the Arctic Monkeys (whom I’ve never heard and of whom I have no opinion) caught my attention. It is saying what I’ve been hearing and saying for a very long time.

I think you’ll find it refreshing, challenging, and a little confusing. Yes, there is an advantage to losing the old business model of music. This time, it is all about the bands.

Just for fun I took the color quiz. In the interest of wearing my heart on my sleeve, reaching for ever greater transparency, etc, you can look at my results. It’s weird how close you can get by clicking on colored blocks. I wonder how it really works.

tottinge took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! “Shelves his ambitions and forgoes his desire for p…” Click here to read the rest of the results.

We are looking for our new church. We’ve been in the area for a while and have attended maybe three churches. It’s funny, really, this whole process.

It’s not like we are carrying around questionable habits and are looking for someone to allow them. Nor are we looking for someone “up to our standards” of behavior. We’re not looking to recreate a past experience or find a style that is uniquely fitted to us. We’re definitely not choosing on the basis of ABC (attendance, buildings, and cash: a criteria we just hate). We’re not looking for programs and projects. We’re not looking for a church that is finished and perfect either.

When we first came to Avon, IN we attended several. One church, when we visited it, immediately had a feel that is hard to describe. Avon Community Church of the Nazarene was “home” on our first visit, and we fell in love with the people and pastor immediately. We were happy to be involved with the youth and music and sunday school ministries, with the kitchen and whatever else we could put our hands to. We were family, and those things were opportunities to work together. We still love the people who worked with us and who loved us and brought us into their midst so warmly. These are uniquely good people. What are the chances that could happen again?

When that engagement went rather sour, we didn’t shop around. We went to Danville Calvary Church of the Nazarene a church that had once been pointed out to me by a trusted mentor (Dr. K. Jewell) and we fell in love with the congregation immediately. It wasn’t that they were our age group or shared our interests or worshipped in our style, or had the programs we wanted. We held limited involvement, but we were whole-heartedly in love and ready to be members. Still are, really. I would as soon be there as any church in the world. I don’t expect to repeat that instant respect for the pastor and member and the instant love we all felt for each other, but it would sure be nice. There is no replacement or substitute for the relationships there. Better, we were able to keep in close touch with many of our friends from Avon (Avon and Danville are neighbors along state road 36).

Now we are ‘way up north in Illinois. Our warmest welcome was from the Mundelein Church of the Nazarene. We were warmly welcomed and were able to settle into the sunday school very easily. Some of the other churches we visited didn’t have sunday school. This is another smaller congregation (for this area) and has a fine young pastor and a lot of good folks. Their style is not too far from ours (music is more sedate) and there is a nice spread of generations from grannies to (a whole hoard of) new babies, and all ages in between. It sure seems like a loving and healthy place. We may settle in there, but we don’t feel that immediate connection we had the last two times. Maybe we never will again, for all I know.

So I’m trying to understand the process. There’s not anything in particular I’m looking for. I’m not looking for a “successful” church or one that “fits my style” or “agrees with my particular choices” or one that has a lot of programs that can involve me and the kids. I’m not looking for a church that “tickles our ears.” We aren’t looking for one to beat us up or one to flatter us or rant against the things we disagree with. What are we looking for? I don’t know. Maybe just the sense that we are in the place that God has chosen for us. I hope that place is up here now.

If I find myself looking for programs or potential growth or worldly success or a tim-centered faith, I’m hoping that I’ll stop and slap myself about the face and neck (figuratively) for giving in to such a weak imitation.

You all have certainly heard about how Canada’s Nettwerk Music Group is helping a young person defend against the RIAA. The cool part is the statement that is made:

Since 2003 the RIAA has continually misused the court and legal system, engaging in misguided litigation tactics for the purpose of extorting settlement amounts from everyday people — parents, students, doctors, and general consumers of music. In doing so, the RIAA has misapplied existing copyright law and improperly employed its protections not as a shield, but as a sword. Many of the individuals targeted by the RIAA are not the ‘thieves’ the RIAA has made them out to be.

And later:

Litigation is not ‘artist development.’ Litigation is a deterrent to creativity and passion and it is hurting the business I love. The current actions of the RIAA are not in my artists’ best interests.”\

It is nice to see that someone gets it.

In barely-related news, it looks like MinDawn has the right basic idea. I’m getting curious. They give either ogg (like mp3 but better) or FLAC file format (lossless format) albums that you are explicitely allowed to use in mp3 players or burned to CD or whatever you want to do with it. Instead of suing and attacking and controlling their customers, they’re trying to serve their customers. I am not totally crazy about the special app to preview files (preferring that they had lower-quality perhaps partial songs you could download for free), but I think that this is a very good sign. They’re also getting some interesting artists there. It’s neat.

Now I guess I can call off the army of giant monsters I’ve been growing to deal with the RIAA.

Okay, this time I’m posting something that I really don’t know anything about, mostly as a way of sharing the link with you all and the many locations where I may want to access it.

It is the Free Operating System Zoo, where you can get help downloading and installing various operating systems on your machine through QEMU (emulator). It looks like a lot of fun.

The idea is that you can install QEMU on your PC (let’s assume you run Windows for a second), and use QEMU to run other operating systems. Free operating systems. You can see which ones can run on your machine, and play with them each. I know that my friends at Progeny have been using QEMU to test custom operating system installers for a while.

Now, you can try other operating systems either through live CDs or through the zoo. Enjoy!

Time for another article on the out-of-control wild people over at our favorite evil empire. The commentary at this site is good. I don’t need to add anything, but essentially they’ve decided that they don’t need to prove that you’ve done something wrong. Again. There is more citationi of the facts indicating that their decline in CD sales has nothing to do with pirace, but has a lot to do with the business model.

I might suggest that some of us aren’t buying CDs because we don’t like DRM and the attitude of the jackbooted RIAA nazis.

Ooops. Godwin’s law. Post over.

So beautiful it makes you cry:

Tell me it doesn’t make you want one!

This is a dual-voiced beauty. I would just love to play with one of these for a week or two. I may someday be able to afford it or one of its little brothers, when I have the time to play with them. It’s another guitar that’s almost too beautiful to play, if you didn’t want to play it so badly!

Above the left F-hole you can see the sliders for the acoustic guitar (piezo) pickups. The flat space on the lower right of the body is where the plugs are (yes, plural: one for acoustic, one for electric). I didn’t play the Montreal, but I played a few others, and they had dual (or triple) plugs on the body, and also a switch to make the electric pickup plug handle a mix of electric and acoustic. It really was a very cool sound (played through a good amp).

If you are curious, click on the image and check out the specs. Oh, look! We have the hot rodded humbucker set again! Seymour rocks. Love those Duncans.

This is such a beautiful guitar (and the pic is a link):

Unless I miss my guess, that’s the Duncan hotrodded humbucker set, the very set I want for my old Ovation Breadwinner (yeah, I’m going to passive humbuckers in both positions). The Schecter guitars I’ve played at the stores had very nice necks, so I think that I could really enjoy one of these. I could imagine sticking it up on the wall in a frame and just looking at it for several hours a day. It’s really a beautiful piece of furniture in addition to having nice electronics and a good feel.

I could imagine one of these in my living room.

I’ve been listening to the podcast for Brave Men Run. I started it because it came from Radio Memories Network a regular source of Old-Time Radio (OTR) for my commutes.

It’s one of those comic-books-come-to-life kind of thing, where people discover others with special abilities. It’s been a lot of fun so far, and I’m only on the 18th chapter (the 6th broadcast). If you want to give it a listen, you can try either of the above links. If you’re not into the genre (watchmen, comics, etc) then you might not be interested in at all, but science fiction/fantasy fans should give it a shot. I don’t mind giving the author/reader a free plug here:

26 Jan 2006, Update: the more recent installments take on a “young man comes of age” angle, and have moved toward the R rating. I’m not so crazy to recommend it to the younger audience (has underage drinking and some sexual content to distract from the story). But the story is still interesting and it’s still going somewhere interesting, I think. If you don’t want to overlook that, then maybe it’s best not to get hooked.

While you’re at Radio Memories, you should check out channel 6, the history channel.

I don’t know how they play, or how they sound, but I like how they look. What a great brand name for praise musicians! I had considered looking for a deacon (I own a breadwinner I’m going to mod) for the same reason.

Anyway, the ‘charger’ looks like this:

PS: I found this site for old electric ovation fans. Where is Scott Bump when you want to show him an Ovation Viper pic?

A new article introduced me to Gnash!. GNU is once again doing what commercial companies would not do. Gnu is now creating a good, free, clean-room implementation of a shockwave player for Linux. I think that my kids will be quite excited about this, since they love flash games. I like that it’s a standalone movie viewer. I like silliness like Switch To Linux and StrongBad Email. I’m sure there is all kinds of silliness I could archive for later play.

I’m kind of interested in finding some shockwave/flash authoring solutions that run in Linux. Maybe an open-source implementation makes all of that possible.

According to a recent ArsTechnica article there is a strong uptake in the use of open source in the US and Europe.

In the difficult economy here, US companies seem to be using open source primarily for bottom-line cost savings. In Europe, however, the decision swings towards certain open source projects because of their quality and flexibility.

In the desktop space, the report is that Linux desktops are being adopted in a more grass-roots kind of way. American companies pride themselves on imitating their competitors, and apparently that is significant. The article says that

… employee demand and sucessful deployments by competitors are more relevant than cost savings and customization as far as Linux [desktop] adoption is concerned

I also stumbled upon another article from O’Reilly about reasons people adopt linux. Tom Adelstein points out that it has a lot less to do with rebellion against Microsoft than one might think.

Well, however you slice it, there are more than one or two good reasons to use Linux.

Personally, I like being able to share it with other people. I use Debian, and I can copy and share it as much as I want, and the Debian project is pleased with me doing so. You can put it on your kids’ computers, on your wife’s and grandparents’ computers, on your laptop AND your desktop, all from the same disk (or network source), all without paying any licensing fees. Being able to share matters a lot when you’re a geek household with more computers than people.

I have to admit that I was pretty fed up with Micro$oft, especially back in the day when Kempin ran the OEM affairs, and during the antitrust trials. I don’t hate them, but I didn’t like the way they were doing business (especially their licensing). I still prefer using any alternative.

I use the Debian stable release when I want stability (duh) and the unstable release for casual use. I don’t mind so much when new things are a bit broken for a little while. I like to be close to the leading edge for my fun stuff.

I like how it performs, even with limited hardware. I was surprised to find that my computer at work (running Windows) was much slower than my laptop (running Debian) even though the work desktop is a desktop, and has as much ram, and has a much more modern hard disk, and has a faster processor. My main linux computer at home is a 450MHz, 294MB RAM, 20 GB disk machine, and performs at least as well as my work computer does in Windows. Oh, I booted up a puppy linux live CD at work, and it was killer fast. It figures.

But one of the big killer reasons I use linux is that it has a lot of free programming tools and languages. I can do so much more for free in Linux than I could possibly afford to do in Windows, and I can copy all of my tools to all of my systems without risking the wrath of some west-coast lawyers. I actually have to go delete the ones I’m not using, since I installed everything under the sun. I may not learn Forth and Haskell and Sather this year. I’m still learning ruby, groovy, and java, refreshing on C++, and playing in Python. I promised myself to learn smalltalk. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s all available for free (including web frameworks and gui frameworks). Oh, and did I mention PostgreSQL? You need a good database sometimes, and that’s what it is.

Well, I guess our 500 signatures are in (easily). We had until 6 February to get 500. I guess this is some kinda success.

Now, whether it matters or not is a different story, but the idea that you can get almost 3300 people in less than a month should tell the industry something. I don’t know what happened on Jan 09-11, but someone must have promoted this a bit. Slashdot or something.

According to Master C# a goal of .NET was to do away with the registry. Well, there you go. I thought it was a bad idea from the get-go.

It might not have been so bad, if it at least had a good, solid database behind it, but it was dreadfully slow and didn’t take very good care of itself. It became messy and slow and just got worse and worse as time went by. It wasn’t in a human-readable file (that I know of) and data wasn’t sufficiently segregated by application, and it was awful. I know that they thought it was a great idea to get away from individual text files, but I thought it a poverty from the start.

I’m glad it’s dead. Ahh, it’s good to be right.

This weekend we went to Avon, IN to celebrate a birthday. The trip on friday was a mess, with all the snow and near-whiteout conditions. We only got as far as Merrilville, IN and had to get a hotel. We finally drove in on Saturday. It was weird to go from snow and ice and cold to a relatively warm, sunny day only a little distance south.

It was so good of Avon Community Church to allow us the use of the fellowship hall for our party. There were a lot of kids from the Hendricks County Theater group and from the church. It was an incredible swirl of kids. I had a great time talking with parents and visiting with kids.

Sunday was a little bit of a tougher call. We wanted to go to Avon because there are changes afoot and because they helped with our party (boosting the attendence by 4 is a very, very small repayment). I was homesick for Danville, but thought that maybe it would be a good step toward complete healing to be there and see our Avon friends. We had such a warm welcome and enjoyed the company and companionship of such good people. Oh, to be sure, there were some who were happier to keep their distance and some who demonstrated “intentional and pointed non-interaction”, but we expected this and we understand.

It was a strange feeling, being half-comfortable in such a familiar place.

The church was having a special event, assessing on a new pastor candidate. I think that this can be a good thing for them. It will be good to have continuity restored following a time of instability and difficulty. I was once offered a bit of sound advice, that when I’m under stress I should brush my teeth or iron a shirt or do dishes — that doing normal things can make you feel normal for a little while. I think that there is a lot of comfort in continuity (even though familiarity breeds contempt), and any candidate that has the recommendation of Dr. Ken Jewell has got to be a good man.

Well, I now know quite a few routes to work. I’ve tried a great many, and am learning some of the tricks of getting around in the northwest burbs of Chicagoland. I know some good places to eat in a few towns. I’m quite happy with the house and the neighborhood, and the kids like the schools. I am rather more comfortable and familiar with the work, and continue to grow day-by-day in the techniques. I’m proud of the team I work with and the work we’re doing right now. I’m glad to be part of the kind of company that tries to serve its customers well through partnership.

While I am somewhat plugged in with the company, I’m not into a church in a steady way. I’ve tried a few, and found them quite wonderful, but haven’t felt that kind of immediate sense of “home” that I felt initially at Calvary Nazarene in Danville, IN (do give this one a visit and fall in love with everyone). Nor did I get that immediate sense of belonging that I’d felt at Avon Community (Avon, IN). At least not yet. I’m re-visiting one this week, I think.

Libby enjoys the work and the area as well, but has been too busy to keep up the blogging. I have probably been blogging for two people anyway, between blogsome and the company blog.

Well, I just wanted my friends and family to know that we’re settling in, learning our way around, and starting to feel at home here now. It’s a nice place to be, and we’re being treated well, though we’re still a bit isolated.

25 Reasons to Convert to Linux are given by The Linux Information Project. I like to extend item #4. A guy asked me the other day about risks involving the Debian project, and I told him (truthfully) that you couldn’t take down the Debian project with an atomic bomb. It’s rather an amazing thought.

My reasons NOT to rush into converting are
1) cheap off-the-shelf pc hardware compatibility (which is imperfect, esp. with laptops and wireless cards: both improving) and
2) some idiots don’t realize that a lot of people (LOT!) use Windows and Linux and BSD. Windows-only stuff is an annoyance.

I just ran Nautilus for the first time in a long time, and I was amazed at how smart it is. I may have to run that from withing XFCE now and again. Nice work, Nautilus project. Good hardware handling.

Otherwise, it’s great stuff…especially if you run XFCE.

Too funny. I thought my friend Vicki would get into this article.

cantonrep.com
tells us a scary story. I guess setting an example is what it’s all about. I’m waiting for the “refreshing the web page is the same as stealing” commercial from the RIAA.

That’s what we need — more reasons to lock up kids.

I guess that there’s a few lines crossed, though I’m not buying “equal but opposite” here.

Free Culture has a pretty good article on DRM also linked from a pledge you can sign. I think a guy could do worse than to check it out and participate. Maybe we can get enough people involved that it matters. Sadly, it’s only one month to fill it up.